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Howto install gdal with ECW support

Gdal does support the ECW format, but it is not included by default. One method is to compile the ECW plugin and gdal from source.

When in doubt, read the guide from the gdal website, but here is a summary of the process:

Building libecwj

No need to register on http://www.erdas.com, they don't seem to offer a source package for linux any longer. Instead look for the older version libecwj2-3.3-2006-09-06.zip / libecwj2-3.3-2006-09-06.tar.gz, which can be downloaded at several places. Unpack the archive.
You may want to apply some patches, here and here.

Building gdal

Download gdal source.
If you want python support (necessary for some additional scripts that come with gdal, e.g. gdal2tiles.py), make sure you have the python development packages installed, (e.g. python-all-dev on Ubuntu).